POD -- PRINT ON DEMAND:

Are you a K12 Teacher or University Professor?
Do you know how to negotiate with your employer to own what you create for your brick and mortor classroom or virtual online class?

A Few Sales Tricks Can Launch a Book To Top of Online Lists with a mass email called the Best-Seller Blast. You can buy placement (for around $10 - 15 grand) that is sent out by big-time authors. Amazon seems to refresh its numbers 35 minutes after every hour. Used and new book sales are counted equally. So an author anxious about his sales ranking could put a few dozen of his books for sale for a penny apiece and ask a friend to buy them all.

Do you publish your content online? Do Search engines use your content without paying you?
Global Publishers to launch new initiative to tackle search engines press release.
The new project, called ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is an automated system which allows online content providers to systematically provide information about access and use of their content to news aggregators and others on the web. The information, provided in a form that can be recognised and interpreted by search engine “crawlers”, will tell search engine operators and other users under what terms they can use the content.

THE GOOD NEWS

1/14/15 Readers have been dreading the rise of e-books since before the technology even existed. A 1991 New York Times piece predicting the imminent invention of the personal e-reader spurred angry and impassioned letters to the editor. One reader wrote in to express his worry that the new electronic books wouldn't work in the bath.

Twenty-three years later, half of American adults own an e-reading device. A few years ago, Obama set a goal of getting e-textbooks into every classroom by 2017. Florida lawmakers have passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.

Despite the embrace of e-books in certain contexts, they remain controversial. Many people just don’t like them: They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of 6 to 17-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier.

Though it has been over 15 years since Project Gutenberg starting publishing classic literature online and seven since Amazon launched the Kindle, research into how e-books change readers’ experience has been scarce. Defenders of print books usually rely on anecdote or intuition—which can make it easy to dismiss them as Luddites or romantics. And the relative lack of data has sometimes forced them to resort to the hyperbolic—Andrew Piper proclaiming that e-reading isn’t reading at all - or the petty - Peter Conrad complaining that e-readers don’t align margins the way he likes. With her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, brings more data to the case for print. Baron and her colleagues surveyed over 300 university students in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Slovakia, and found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading. (She finds that the format doesn’t matter so much for "light reading.") When students were given a choice of various media—including hard copy, cell phone, tablet, e-reader, and laptop - 92 percent said they could concentrate best in hard copy.

"The group we assumed would gobble this up were teenagers and young adults," says Baron. “But they talked about things I didn’t think 18 to 26-year-olds cared about anymore. '

Alice Robb: Why are young people - who are accustomed to doing most things on screens - resistant to e-books?

Naomi Baron: There are two big issues. The first was they say they get distracted, pulled away to other things. The second had to do with eye strain and headaches and physical discomfort.

When I asked what they don’t like about reading on a screen - they like to know how far they’ve gone in the book. You can read at the bottom of the screen what percent you’ve finished, but it’s a totally different feel to know you’ve read an inch worth and you have another inch and a half to go. Or students will tell you about their visual memory of where something was on the page; that makes no sense on a screen. One student said, “I keep forgetting who the author is. In a print book all I have to do is flip back and I see it.” There are all kinds of reasons students will give - "I have a sense of accomplishment when I finish a book and I want to see it on the shelf." They care about the smell of a book. In the Slovakian data, when I asked what do you like most about reading in hard copy, one out of ten talked about the smell of books. There really is a physical, tactile, kinesthetic component to reading.

AR: So students feel like they’re learning more when they actually read books in print, but do we know whether they actually retain more?

NB: Generally speaking, if you give standardized tests on comprehension of passages, the results are about the same on a screen or on hard copy. There are a number of studies that have been done in different countries - in Germany, Austria, Israel, United States, Norway.

But you have to ask: What do you want to measure? Do you want to measure comprehension? That’s a fairly plain, middle-school way of talking about what it means to read. Did you get so involved in that book that you didn’t notice what was going on around you? That you insisted on staying up until three o’clock in the morning? Did you cry?

My research shows people are more likely to re-read if they have a book in hard copy. You might see the title on your shelf and think, “I hadn’t thought about that scene in a long time.” There are certain connections we make that go beyond decoding words.

AR: You argue in the book that e-books make reading a more social, less personal experience.

NB: If you’re annotating on a Kindle, on a Kobo, you see - you know how many people thought that word was really important, or maybe everybody else liked this passage. If we sat and thought about it, what we think the author has to say. … Rather, we’re just trying to present ourselves or fit in.

AR: Why do students buy e-books if they don’t like them?

NB: One argument that students give in favor of electronic media is saving the environment. But this is a hard thing to measure well. If you read 400 books in the life-span of your kindle, was that energy-efficient? Probably. But then there’s the question of energy and recycling. Where is it that these devices get recycled? Who does the recycling? What kind of protective gear do they have? And in terms of all those trees we use for paper - we have creative ways of using woodchips or whatever to make paper.

In the United States, e-books are less expensive. Students will say, "I’d like to have the print version, but the electronic version is so much less expensive." But if you buy a book used, the publisher and the author are not getting any money but they are getting another reader and they’re not cutting another tree. And the cost is less. And if it goes to a third generation the cost is really less.

My major concern, as a person in higher education, is that we’re not listening. We’re assuming we’re being helpful by lowering price, by making it more convenient, by helping the environment, but we don’t bother asking our students what they think. ~ by Alice Robbnewrepublic.com/article/120765/naomi-barons-words-onscreen-fate-reading-digital-world

Case study of Lightning Source, the main POD provider in the country, great entry point for any writer interested in self-publishing, get right into the costs, the problems and the profits.

A single POD printer actually prints almost ALL of the POD books on the market: Lightning Source. They're a division of Ingram books, which in turn distributes the vast majority of books to brick and morter as well as online bookstores. Basically, Ingram has a great vertical market and did a great job of setting it up.

The list of places that LIGHTENING SOURCE recommends you go TO if you're an author and not a publisher yourself is a long one. If you've heard of any of these, they all use LS to do the printing: AuthorHouse, Aventine Press, Black Forest Press, Booklocker.com, Inc, BookPublisher.com, Cold Tree Press, Cork Hill Press, First Books, Infinity Publishing, Llumina Press, Morgan James Publishing, LLC, Outskirts Press, PageFree Publishing, Inc., Publish America, Tabby House, Universal Publishers, Unlimited Publishing, WinePress Publishing, Xulon Press, Cafe Press.Lulu and iUniverse are just 2 of a long list of “publishers” who are little more than middle-men taking manuscripts and passing them on to Lightning Source.
Lulu.com lets people set their own price, but the company takes a commission on books sold, Xlibris is more of a traditional publisher in that it charges a fee, pays royalties and provides copyediting and marketing services, iUniverse charges fees, pays royalties and offers editing and distribution services.

The PDF DRM offered by Lightning Source includes options for how many pages can be printed and how often and whether the file can be copied or backed-up.

Bound Book Scanning and Bookbaby.com Have a book you want the world to see? BookBaby makes it easy to publish and distribute your eBook. BookBaby will convert and digitally distribute your work to the biggest eBook retailers in the world, including: Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony Reader Store, Kobo, and more. eBook publishing starts at just $99!

"Amazon Shorts"online publishing project
delivers short stories and essays by well-know authors to readers for $0.49 each. And purchasers can save and print the pieces "forever." I if Amazon Shorts is successful, it could provide an inexpensive way to augment course materials. If you prefer publishing an ebook directly through Amazon, they'll publish your books or brochures as Amazon e-docs for a 50/50 split.

fastpencil.comFastPencil is Software in the Cloud - so you don't have to download anything to your computer.Books and eBooks are widely distributed to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle, Nook, Apple iPad, and Ingram 1-866-960-9401

Blurb.com, which offers do-it-yourself bookmaking and on-demand professional printing, authors set their own prices, keep all profits, and sell them through the Blurb bookstore. Blurb handles all shipping and sales transactions and each month sends all profits on the book to the creator.
Bottom line: The quickly growing service provides an opportunity most aspiring authors wouldn't otherwise get without paying a fee to some vanity press.